Known uses

Pettigrew may have used an extremely powerful blasting curse to decimate a street and kill twelveMuggles at once while evading Sirius Black, who was blamed for the crimes and Pettigrew's alleged death.[2] The explosion was so fierce, it left a massive crater in the street, with the pipes showing. The Ministry gave an excuse of a "gas leak" to the surviving Muggles, and thought that Black was the one who used the curse.

Known practitioners

Etymology

Confringo is Latin for "I break".

Behind the scenes

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 Professor McGonagall possibly uses the Blasting Curse to duel against Snape (just in case this is not the Blasting Curse, it is referred to as the Fiery offensive spell), defeating Amycus and Alecto Carrow in the process. Though it did not burn them and simply knocked them down, leaving them incapacitated.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Harry uses the Blasting Curse against Nagini in an attempt to kill her and possibly to provoke Voldemort to chase Harry, so the snake would stay behind unprotected. This fails in that the spells bounces off Nagini, due to her magical protection, and instead strikes multiple Death Eaters, though they were only knocked over and otherwise seemed undamaged by the explosive spell. Immediately after this instance, Voldemort also casted several Blasting Curses at Harry as he jumped into a corridor and escaped Voldemort's wrath.

Both this spell and Expulso share similar effects, though - unlike the latter - Confringo is sometimes accompanied by fiery explosions. The reason for this may be that Confringo is the result of a sharp, local temperature increase where as Expulso increases the local pressure to cause explosions. However, in the Deathly Hallows video games, Confringo is an explosive spell, while Expulso serves as a sort of "machine gun" spell, causing damage similar to gunshots.

In different varieties of games and films, the colour of Confringo varies. Its two main colours so far are a light blue and purple, or simply a fiery explosion.

In the video game adaption of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the colour of the curse varies. For the player, the curse is blue; enemies fire red curses; bosses, Snape, Greyback and Bellatrix, fire green curses.